When I (David Hermann) joined OktoLab in mid-2008, we had to face some serious challenges. The previous (and at that time only) developer had abandoned the company at short notice and left a mess of various software services that were either loosely or not at all coupled. [...] This situation was not caused by the developer, it was a result of the evolution of the company. The situation had gotten out of hand though, so there was a huge pressure to improve it.

His choice of framework for this new software tool was, obviously, Symfony and he combined it with some javascript/ajax, working with the external-facing APIs the other data sources had and what all of his work got for him and the company - a 30% drop in how long it took to get things done.

The PHP 'conference circuit' if you will, is one that has grown up in a different manner than other conference circuits that I've been familiarized with in the past (Java, Adobe, 'Web', etc). In most of these other areas, the speakers are PAID to attend. [...] On the flip side, in the PHP conference circuit, every speaker there, in fact, is PAYING for the right to attend that conference and be a part of it.

He talks about the fact that speakers will have more than just the cost of the conference to worry about. In fact, sometimes they can all add up to more than the conference would have cost them normally.

In the end, my point is this. I feel that given the nature of all of these conferences. That the organizers and attendees need to understand the situation and treat the speakers not as a '˜professional speaker that they paid good money to see'. But as what they really are. Far more akin to an Open Source Developer, who is donating their time for the better good and education of the masses.

One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we've found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio.

If you're a Zend Studio user and want to get a little less frustrated at the formatting it uses for your applications, download the tool and follow the instructions in the post to get it working in your IDE.

In this tutorial, we're going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage.

They start with the backend and move their way forward, setting up the MySQL tables - categories, replies, users and topics. They describe each of them in a bit more detail before getting into the code. They show how to create template for the site (with a little CSS) and include code to create users, authenticate them, set up their permission levels, making categories/topics and much more.

The full code for the forum application they've created can be downloaded here.

MiMViC is a modular and lightweight PHP 5.3+ Web application framework designed to help build dynamic and robust Web sites. It's theory is based on minimal and framework emphasizes on only core glue for your complex PHP web sites. Today I will show you how to create a shout-box using the MiMViC framework. It won't take you more than 15 mins to get the job done and have friendly URLs as well.

Sample code for the "shoutbox" is included. Their example shows an Apache setup and a MySQL backend (complete with namespace-enabled code). A simple form to take in a "shout" works directly with the framework to save the information quickly and easily.